My Potty: Reading Shelley Jackson next to three elderly gentlemen in
the Sci-Li

Ian Jones

Reading Shirley Jackson's My Body has indeed been a hypertextual
experience, as some members of the class have fetishized and some have disliked. Since each and every reader in the class
has had a different experience digesting this story,
following their own links and meandering over the carcass (link to My Body)
touching those body parts as they saw fit, I find it hard to comment on
anything other than the basic principles which have already been discussed
(the structure of the links, the writing, a critiquing of the use of visual
and text elements). So perhaps I should just share my experience as a
reader...

So it was mid-afternoon, a beautiful day, and I was spending it in the
Sci-Li basement- trying to finish my Cyberspace, Virtual Reality and
Critical Theory reading. It was pretty packed... Brown students searching the abstracts for
papers to paraphrase, and a group of aged men (post-professor emeritis
stage) consulting Josiah next to
me. Calling up My Body on my laptop, I began to read and write my
paper. All went well...arm, skin, butt, until I got to the vagina... the
old men next to me got distracted..."pee... vagina... Joyce..." The next
thing I knew, I was fleeing from the scandalous looks of the old men into
the bathroom, my laptop in hand. I slipped on the wet tiles, and before I
time to say Beaudrillard three times fast... my laptop flew into the
toilet. When I had retrieved the device and turned it on. I noticed that
the words on the screen had changed. My potty had rewritten Jackson. It was
then I knew I was going to write this essay...

Reading about Jackson's vagina rewriting classical literature, I guess I
was struck by Jackson's use of the body to rewrite her projected identity
and memory. By using her body as an autobiographical mechanism, Jackson
forces her body into the electronic realm, forces us to consider how our
own identities are truly interlaced with our physical realities. This is
particularly striking given the non-corporial forms of relating and getting
to know other people in other digital forums... such as MOOs (like our
class' experience with Jesse's hellyeah.com- which was truly disorienting
and disembodied- just picture George P. Landow as a talking statue or the
fact that several students were online as several different identities at
once) As Jesse (link
to) states better than I:

The coming of the computer age has brought about something more exciting
than free porn, and more useful than the ability to order a pizza to your
door without ever having to pick up the phone. It has brought into reach
the ability for communication on a scale far grander than any public square
or even any newspaper could ever offer. Never before has there every been
the opportunity for individuals to step out of their physical surroundings
and into a situation where traditional stereotypes have no meaning and
where the words that are spoken mean everything.

In integrating her body in such a complete way into our understanding of
her, Jackson enables not only her personality, but also her physicality to
come through the text. To me, this meant most of my time reading was not
spent reading myself into her autobiography (which is what I usually do
with autobiographical sketches- compare and contrast, try to identify and
relate to the author), but rather reading myself into my own body. Thus my
computer, instead of being (as is conventionally the case) adevice that
furthers the separation of mind and body, of physical space and
virtual/mental space, rather serves to reinforce my body's presence and
importance in my living experience.